The Words of the Prophets

The Words of the Prophets by Chris Green

I’m sure I logged out last night and shut the laptop down. It’s something I am in the habit of doing. This morning, to my astonishment, there’s a new document open on the screen. Three thousand words. It claims to be a story of mine. I know I’ve been absent-minded lately, but I would have remembered if I had got up in the night and written three thousand words. Betty is away at her sick mother’s, so there was no one else in the house. The doors were locked. I’m spooked.

It is called simply New Story. On a quick read through, I find the story is better than most of my recent work. It is about a poor boy who leaves his home and his family in search of fortune and fame. He’s struggling to get by in a harsh world. He now wants to escape the bitter cold of New York winters and make his way back home. He feels alone in the city, the only living boy in the great metropolis. He likens himself to a boxer who needs to dig deep to get himself out of trouble.

It is not my usual territory. I write speculative fiction. Anthropomorphic characters. Unreliable history, That sort of thing This is a straightforward account of a human being with real feelings and emotions. The absence of strange in the narrative is as maybe, but surely there is sufficient mystery in how it came to be here on my computer. The document was last saved at 3:13 a.m. This would probably place it in the middle of the steamy dream I was having about Kathy, my publishers PA. Document History tells me I am looking at revision number one. I’m not sure if this statistic includes autosaves, but it suggests a competent typist with a determination to get the job done. An online plagiarism check finds no correlation with other online texts. However impossible it might seem, this has been typed out on my laptop in the middle of the night without waking me by someone who knows my password.

Whatever its origins, one does not look a gift horse in the mouth. I can use the story to get over my writer’s block. But if I am to pass it off as mine, it is important to put my stamp on it. During the day, I edit out some of the most overt sentimentality. I give the protagonist an imaginary friend called Art. I introduce a cult that worships a blind goat and create an alien communications centre in the back of an antiquarian bookshop in Queens. I make a note to develop these ideas later.

Betty phones and asks how I am and what I have been doing. I don’t want to alarm her or get her to think that I might be having a crisis like I did last spring, so I tell her I’ve been tidying up the garden. I’ve cut back the laurel hedging, weeded the veg patch, and separated the parsley from the sage in the herb garden. What about the rosemary and the time, she says? I tell her I will get on to it. She says her mother is still not very steady, so she won’t be homeward bound just yet. She will need to stay over for another couple of days.

Still puzzled by its origin, but optimistic I can make something of the story, I feel happy with the progress I’ve made. I close the document down. As a security measure against any further incursions, I change my login password to a complex combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and I log out. I wake at 5 a.m., not to the sound of the alarm, but to the sound of the laser printer whirring. I dash downstairs to see what is going on, only to discover that the document is being printed off. How can this be happening? Not only is it being printed off, but I see from the open document on the screen that it has been added to. It is now called The Words of the Prophets and the word count is over four thousand words. I read through it and notice that my changes from the previous day have been reversed.

Determined not to be beaten, I set about revising the document once more. The opening section is a little verbose, so I delete the part about the gullible graduate seduced by the older woman, which doesn’t seem to fit, To give the story greater familiarity, I introduce a few old favourites from my earlier stories, Phillip C. Dark, Guy Bloke and Wet Blanket Ron. To reflect the style my readers have become accustomed to, I add a few curiosities to the narrative. He now has a mongrel dog called Bono. He suffers from porphyrophobia, a fear of the colour purple. A tall thin man with no face wearing a leather duster overcoat and a broad-brimmed black hat pursues him relentlessly around New York and he has taken to hiding out in basement bars in Brooklyn, imbibing Bottled in Bond Bourbon.

I save the document to the flash drive I keep in my jacket pocket and delete the original file on the laptop. I settle down to a glass of wine and a movie and try to put the riddle out of my mind. It can wait until tomorrow. All work and no play and all that. Betty phones to say her mother has taken a turn for the worse. She will be there now until after the weekend. I sympathise. I tell her I have been clearing out the shed and have taken the rusty old bike to the tip. She seems pleased that I am not spending all day huddled over the laptop.

I wake at 4 a.m. from a disturbing dream about being surrounded by silence to the sounds coming from downstairs. It is barely audible, but someone seems to be typing. I throw on my dressing gown and go to investigate. There typing has stopped and there is no sign of anyone. But the document is open on the laptop and has got bigger. Over five thousand words now.

‘Good to see you, Al,’ Charlie says. ‘But I know you only ever come and see me when you have a computer problem. So I’m guessing it’s no accident that you’ve brought the laptop. Virus again, is it?’

‘If only it were that simple, Charlie,’ I say. ‘It’s more of a presence than malware. And it’s pretending to be me.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Charlie says. ‘That will be the Takeover worm. It’s a bad one, old buddy. No one’s come up with a way to remove it yet. It’s so deadly that before you know it, it will have sold your car and cleaned out your bank account.’

‘What?’

‘Only joking, mate. Have a toke on this and I’ll take a look.’

I sit quietly back with the spliff and watch Charlie get to work. He brings up dialogue boxes I never knew existed. I find myself gradually drifting off. I haven’t smoked weed in a long time.

‘How’s Betty?’ Charlie says, bringing me out of my reverie. ‘I saw her a couple of days ago going into Graceland, that new boutique on the High Street.’

‘You couldn’t have, Charlie,’ I say. ‘Betty’s at her mother’s. That’s eighty miles away. She’s been there for a week.’

‘Is she? Oh well! Couldn’t have been her then,’ he says.

Perhaps Betty is deceiving me and she is not really at her mother’s. Her phone calls may have just been to divert suspicion. I felt this last weekend but did not want to admit it. By not acknowledging it, I felt it was not happening. But deep down, if I am honest with myself, I feared the worst. Each time she has called, she has said she is extending her stay. Is she afraid to tell me she is having an affair? Is she worried I might have another breakdown like the one last spring? When I thought she was sleeping with Paul Simon from Bookends, her weekly book reading group? Is this what is happening?

‘Hey! Look!’ Charlie says. ‘This is really weird, Al. According to this, no files have been open on the machine for several days.’

‘Let me have a look.’

‘Here you are! See! That’s what it says. Are you sure you’re OK? You haven’t been seeing that quack doctor again, have you? You know. Garth’s uncle?’

‘No, but perhaps I should.’

‘I would say, steer clear. By the way, Al, when you mentioned this new story, I wondered what happened to that story you showed me about the bridge. I thought that was pretty good.’

‘Bridge?’

‘Yes, the one over the troubled waters.’

Copyright © Chris Green, 2024: All rights reserved